The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
23 June 2024
Student: If one is a Brahma or born in a Brahma world, it’s not necessary that one will have less rebirth.
Than Ajahn: Right, you will still come back. When the strength of your mindfulness lessen, your defilement will push your mind out of jhāna, push it toward the sensual pleasures. First, the defilement will do it by the spiritual sensual pleasures. In the spiritual world, there’s spiritual sensual pleasures. The pleasure you get from good dreams are sensual pleasures in your dream, right? When you come out of the Brahma world, you enter into the Deva world. The Deva world is the world of good dreams, let’s put it that way. Next, when you run out of this kamma, you’ll be reborn as a human again and you come back and do whatever you used to do. If you like meditation, you’ll come back and do meditation. If you like to do good kamma, you’ll come back and do good kamma.
Student: Are the spiritual sensual pleasures also created by defilements?
Than Ajahn: Yes, they are driven by defilements. The defilements are constantly craving for sensual objects, whether spiritual or physical. You get sensual pleasures in the spiritual world by your good kamma. Your good kamma will be the one that generate good experiences in your dreams. Your bad kamma will generate bad experiences in your dreams, like having nightmares, wandering as a beggar, being in a war zone or constantly fighting with somebody. If you keep fighting with people when you are alive, when you die, you will continue to fight with them in your dream.
When you do good kamma, this good kamma will be recorded in your mind and will be replayed when you die. If you do bad kamma, this bad kamma will be recorded in your mind, and when you die, this bad kamma will be replayed in your dreams. Until these good and bad kamma can no longer produce any good or bad dreams, then it’s time for you to take a new birth, a human birth. When your kamma is neutral, you have no good dreams and you have no bad dreams, then it’s time for you to wake up.
So you have a new body and come out of your mommy’s womb and start crying. You wake up. You’ve been in a long sleep. It’s like sleeping. The difference is you get a new body when you wake up. Your old body no longer can function anymore, so you discard your old body and take up a new body in the mother’s womb. When you’re born, you’re ejected from your mother’s womb, and then you wake up and start crying. The first thing you do when you wake up is crying because you feel hungry, thirsty, or you have to breathe on your own. When you’re inside the stomach, you don’t have to breathe on your own, but when you come out of the stomach, you have to breathe on your own. So you experience the first dukkha: the dukkha of having to breathe.
Birth is suffering because you have to breathe. If you don’t breathe, you die, and then your defilements will start to push you. Even babies have defilements. Babies want to have comfort. When it’s hot, they will cry. When it’s cold, they will cry. When they are hungry, they will cry. When they are thirsty, they will cry. When they want to see something, they will cry. When they want hear something, they will cry.
That’s why you have to have something for babies to listen to or something for them to watch. So even babies have craving for sensual pleasures. Babies want to see, babies want to hear, that’s why you have to have toys for them to play with to keep them subdued, not complaining, not crying. That’s why you buy toys for children, right? It’s to prevent them from bothering you, to keep them occupied. Nowadays they’re given smart phones to keep them occupied, but this could be harmful to them because smart phones have so many bad influences that will stimulate them to do more bad kamma than good kamma.
This is what it is. It’s all your defilements that keep pushing your mind to go after sensual pleasures. When your body dies, it pushes you to go look for a new body to replace the old body, and you keep replacing your old bodies just like how you’ve been replacing your old phones. How many phones have you replaced so far? If you don’t use them much, then you don’t have to replace them often. Some people use them all the time, from the time they get up to the time they go to sleep, so they have to replace them every year. Every time when there is a new model, they will buy it right away.
So it’s all your defilements, and the only way to slow down and eliminate them is to practice samatha and vipassanā meditation. Samatha will only stop them temporarily. Vipassanā will stop them permanently.
Student: If we don’t use vipassanā, even if we’re good at meditation, it doesn’t help.
Than Ajahn: It doesn’t help you eliminate your cycle of rebirths because your defilements do not die by your mindfulness alone. The cause of your defilement is your delusion, not seeing the truth—the truth of the objects of your craving are actually harmful to you, and not helpful to you because they can give you dukkha. The objects that you want to have to make you happy can turn into something different after you’ve got them because of their anicca nature; and you cannot force them to remain good, to give you happiness all the time because of their anattā nature. So you always end up with dukkha when you go after the sensual objects. They are like drugs, no matter how much you take it, it’s never enough, you will always want more of it. It’s never fulfilling and when you cannot get the next dose, you’ll get dukkha.
So this is what you have to do to prepare for your spiritual world: avoid doing bad kamma, do only good kamma, and meditate to purify your mind, to get rid of your defilements.
Student: It sounds so scary when you said that we’ve done this for millions of times. So scary.
Than Ajahn: It’s scary and it’s also good news that now you know how to get rid of this scary thing.
Without the Buddha telling us what to do, we’d never know anything. We would think that we are the body and when the body dies, we’d think that it’s the end of it. This is how most people think, right?
Because they cannot see the other half of themselves, which is the mind.
“Dhamma in English, Jul 5, 2022.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi_BnRZmNgECsJGS31F495g
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